Pakistan’s labouring children
Children are found working in sectors with hazardous working conditions, especially harmful for children. Most common jobs with such conditions include work in mines, in the cement industry, in textile and glass factories, carpet weaving, marbles, pesticides, filling gas cylinders, crushing stones, and fishing in deep waters. It remains very hard to eradicate this evil, all at once, from a society where so many households live below the poverty line, and hence the economic need that as many people work as possible.
Moreover, both naturally-induced disasters and man-made conflicts subject vulnerable populations, including the poor, women and children to further exploitation. Child labour was thus rightly feared to surge after the record-breaking devastation from floods last year. A recent report by the UK-based charity Save the Children has confirmed these fears, estimating that the number of children forced to work has risen up by a third in areas worst hit by the floods. With their parents still unable to find jobs, children are being sent out to dangerous areas to scour for desperately needed income. Moreover, 10 million children in flood-affected areas are also being denied the food they need to survive and nearly a quarter of the children are suffering from acute malnourishment.
This year again, floods have wreaked havoc in the lives of over five million people in Sindh and Balochistan, and the threat to children, again having to bear the brunt of livelihood of already- vulnerable households, remains an unfortunate reality.
The government of Pakistan ratified the ILO Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention (182) in August 2001, and is obligated to take steps to remove children from hazardous occupations. However, agreeing to international conventions is never enough. What was subsequently required was for the government to show its resolve and come up with effective steps for improving the state of children’s rights in the country and enforce a ban on hazardous occupations under the Employment of Children Act 1991.
The passage of the 18th Amendment and the consequential devolution to the provinces, implies that the passage of such proposed legislation as The National Commission on the Rights of Children Bill of 2009, The Criminal Law Amendment Bill of 2009, The Charter of Child Rights Bill of 2009, The Prohibition of Corporal Punishment Bill of 2010, and The Child Marriages Restraint (Amendment) Bill of 2009, may be further delayed. In any case, effective legal frameworks for the protection of children’s rights, at the provincial level, are now needed more than ever, if we are to fulfil our international obligations.
Our decision-makers must realise that the exploitation of children at an early age can have dangerous long-term implications. In general terms, the most obvious of these would be that the existing environment is such that it is not exactly conducive for children to be able to grow up as productive citizens of society.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 17th, 2011.
COMMENTS (4)
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@Irshad Khan:
You will not have jobs if there is no growth; and there will be no growth unless you address the constraints that are holding it back -- the power crisis, the security environment, uncertainty, circular debt, the loss-making public sector enterprises, recurrent and damaging fiscal slippages, high inflation, and so on.
Article is nicely written with a very good analysis from moral and legal side. There are other fields such as
brick bhattawhose owners are very strong people. I wish to add two more fields where children are being extensively utilised by professionals; One is begging and other is searching and collecting some useful and recycling material from garbage. Both are very dangerous, dirty and immoral professions from all points of view. Children for begging are also being utilised for sex business and for other fields I do not know much. But I have seen garbage collecting children searching and eating left over or thrown away food, found in rubbish, which might be rotten or mixed with poisonous elements or any thing which they don`t know and look like eating material. I have also seen them working in night and also sleeping on heaps of rubbish with bad smell and also dirty water. What kind of parents will afford to see their children in those circumstances; I think only helpless and very deprived. Child labour can not be controlled till the time their parents or grown up citizens are not provided jobs. Creating jobs is the problem in Pakistan and who will do it nobody knows yet."effective legal frameworks for the protection of children’s rights....... are now needed more than ever, if we are to fulfil our international obligations."
Fulfilling international obligations should come last with regard to child labor laws. It is the obligation of the PAK society to protect and educate her children for her own prosperity.
No parents want their children to work for wages. Parents are alike in their love towards their children. Economic poverty of the parents, child employers and society's apathy towards children at work are the root cause.
It is not the Govt responsibility to protect the children from employment. It is the society's obligation.
If the society refuses to employ children, only then it becomes Govt responsibility to enforce child labor laws against violating employers.
How many PAK children are employed as domestic help in each affluent and middle class house hold?
Let PAK start from there.
I agree with you that people should realize that a working child contributes with family members to put a dinner on the table. This does not means that child labor is good thing but one should realize the children are in the vicious circle of the poverty and can't escape from it unless a planned program is done to replace these children with skilled or adult labor.